Category Archives: History

Ever since FIT’s 2012 Commencement, Hue has been thinking about names. So Hue did what any slightly obsessive personality with statistical leanings would do: make a word cloud out of all the names from the program and see which ones rose to the top.

2012 FIT graduates

Nicole and Jessica seem to be the winners, though Samantha, Alexandra, Lauren, and Stephanie are well represented. (Trust Hue, there are far more men at FIT than the word cloud would suggest.)

That got Hue to wondering, how do the names compare with FIT grads from 50 years before?

1962 FIT graduates

Hello, Carol! And Barbara, Susan, and Judith. There doesn’t seem to be much of a link between 1962 and 2012 names… though if you look closely at this one, you can see Stephanie peeking out in the upper left.

One last experiment: Do the names of FIT’s Art and Design grads differ from those from Business and Technology? Does a person’s name have an effect on their choice of career?

2012 Art and Design graduates

2012 Business and Technology graduates

Hmm, not a huge difference. Nicole is the most popular in Art and Design, Jessica in Business and Technology. But Katherine and Sarah seem to be artier names, while Brittany and Alexandra are more businessy. Also, the men’s names are significantly larger in the Art and Design cloud. Note to men: Apply for a business degree.

Alas, with all these names flying around, Hue can’t help feeling left out.

Hue noticed a rather interesting passage in Charles James, a book about the designer (1906-1978), sometimes called “America’s first couturier,” who designed the famous “clover leaf” dresses, and other garments (some of which are in the collection of The Museum at FIT).

Charles James with his ladies

Curator Richard Martin wrote:

“The term ‘genius’ is often used to describe James and he certainly possessed the explosive temperament often associated with that word. But his achievement is, in truth, less than that of a genius. He compromised his 1930s elegance with his work in the 1940s and 1950s, and his pictorial imagination came to surpass his design innovation. So he was probably not a genius, but he was surely close enough to being one that we can look at his dresses with a combination of awe and the more modest respect.”

Hue wonders what it means to be a “genius” in terms of designing clothes. Is sheer beauty enough? Does the garment need to solve problems too?

James’ “Balloon Dress”—probably not being worn by Angelina Jolie any time soon.

Richard Martin (1947-1999) was curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume institute when he died, but he also had a long association with FIT, where he mounted many noted exhibitions.
Check out Martin’s Wikipedia entry.

Back when John Tiffany was in high school, he was researching the 1973 Battle of Versailles fashion show for a speechwriting project, and someone suggested he call Eleanor Lambert, the legendary publicist who organized it.

“She answered the phone, gave me a quote, and wished me luck,” he says.

Eleanor Lambert in her golden years, with John Tiffany

When he moved to New York in 1995, she hired him as one of her assistants, and he had free access to her files, rich with celeb photos and news clippings about the Versailles show, Fashion Week, the March of Dimes, the Coty Awards, the Best Dressed List (which Vanity Fair now oversees), and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, all of which she founded. (She also found time to get her hair done every morning.) “I was probably the first person ever to look through those files,” John says. “I found unopened phone bills from the late ’30s.”

Miss Lambert died in 2003, at 100 years old. Much of those archives—the materials about the Coty Awards and the CFDA— ended up at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art but were recently transferred to FIT’s Special Collections department.

And John wrote a book about her. “Eleanor Lambert: Still Here” is a 320-page coffee-table number out Sept. 7 from Pointed Leaf Press. The book covers her youth, her litany of achievements, and the countless designers who owe her big time for their success.

Eleanor Lambert: Still Here, by John Tiffany

“People told her she was an amateur for thinking that American fashion was just as good as European fashion,” John says. “Nowadays, most people in the world have an American aesthetic—we’re not matchy-matchy, we all wear separates—which she first believed in in the mid-’30s.”

Hue is thinking about beginnings. The beginnings of the Fashion Institute of Technology, for example:

FIT's Marvin Feldman Center, in progress

The above photograph actually represents a second beginning for FIT: In 1958, the college broke ground on West 27th Street, where it remains today. However, the college got its first start in the top two floors of the High School of Needle Trades, two blocks south, on 25th Street, as seen in this undated photograph (probably from the 1940s):

Central Needle Trades High School

Beginnings often arouse such hope, yet they can also inspire anxiety. How will the new enterprise turn out? Will it flourish, or languish? The suspense is killing us.

This blog, Hue Too, began as Hue, FIT’s faboo alumni magazine. But Hue Too will go beyond Hue, reaching for content into every corner of every aspect of the college, its alumni, and the various industries it serves, and providing it in a fresh, spontaneous, immediate…well, bloggy way.

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